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Becoming a Great High School

Chapter 6. Strategy 4: Tracking Student Progress

In the high school we have been building thus far in this book, a high school that is making the jump from being good to becoming great, teachers agree on clear, course-level learning goals, communicate these goals to students, and deliver well-designed units of instruction. They work in course-level or department teams to collaboratively develop rubrics or scoring scales detailing targeted levels of performance for course learning goals. These teachers also use common assessments or items drawn from an assessment bank to provide students with frequent corrective feedback at appropriate points in the learning progression. By this point, our school has already become a high-performing organization. The next step in this process is to design opportunities for students, teachers, teams of teachers, and, perhaps even schools and districts, to track student progress.

Displaying Students' Results Graphically

For more than a decade, formative assessment pioneer Rick Stiggins has been an advocate for student involvement in record keeping as both a powerful trigger for productive emotions and as a research-based strategy for increasing student achievement ("Using asssessment," 1997). It is motivating for students to see that they are making progress toward an important learning goal, even if they are not yet performing at the highest level as identified by a rubric.

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